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Clearly there was trouble in paradise. Just for the record, Yoko did not break up the Beatles; the Beatles were already in irretrievable disarray from the time Brian died and they lost their ballast. Yoko's constant presence was John's way of pouring salt on the wound. On December 31, 1970, the day Paul formally sued the other three to dissolve the partnership of Beatles Ltd., I handed in my resignation. It was a bittersweet goodbye. "I understood perfectly why you were leaving," Ringo said to me in his interview. "You said, 'There's no more I can do.' You didn't want to be a nursemaid anymore, and half the time the babies wouldn't listen to you anyway."

In February of 1971, I moved to New York City, where I became CEO of the Robert Stigwood Organisation in America. I oversaw all the company's divisions and artists' interest in the United States, including Andrew Lloyd Weber, Tim Rice, Eric Clapton, the Bee Gees, as well as theatrical projects like Jesus Christ Superstar and the movie Saturday Night Fever. John and Yoko moved to New York six months later, on August 13, 1971. John never went back to England. When he and Yoko first arrived, they rented a basement apartment in a town house in Greenwich Village, a relatively bohemian part of the city. But town houses in the Village are claustrophobic, without much more sunlight than living in a row house in Liverpool. I invited John and Yoko to lunch at my apartment on Central Park West, and when lunch was over, John went to the living room and stood gazing out of the tall windows of my apartment that overlooked Central Park, one of the most coveted views in the city. It was October, and the park was in its autumnal phase of deep reds and yellows—and in November, the Thanksgiving Day Parade goes by right under your nose. "This is so beautiful!" John said. "This is where I want to live."

When John left that day, he asked my doorman if there were any available apartments in the building. When there weren't, John went to the building next door, the Dakota, to ask the doorman if there were any apartments available there. Eventually, John and Yoko bought an apartment in the Dakota; then they bought the apartment next door, plus two smaller apartments on the eighth floor for their staff. Finally, Yoko bought an apartment on the ground floor for her office. The ceiling was blue painted with puffy white clouds. It was a pleasure having them for neighbors and running into them on the street.

A very short time after John was killed, Yoko asked me to meet her at the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park. She didn't touch her food, or the tea she'd ordered. Her major worry was Sean. She said, "I don't know if I have natural maternal instincts." She'd failed with her daughter, Kyoko, and she feared she would fail with Sean too. She said that John had always looked after Sean, while she tended to business, and how could she ever be as good a mother to Sean as John was?

I felt terribly sad for her. "Just by telling me this proves you 'do' have maternal instincts. You're full of love and caring, and I know you'll make a great mother." (Which she did.) I also said that I knew John sometimes bent the rules with Sean, and perhaps she shouldn't be so strict. One day in the park a year before, I had run into John and Sean eating ice cream cones. Ice cream was forbidden on their macrobiotic diets. John and Sean cheated by walking through the park all the way to Rumpelmayer's ice cream parlor on Central Park South so Yoko wouldn't catch them. When I told her that story, she smiled. "I will let him cheat too," she said.

I saw Yoko frequently over the years after John's death and enjoyed many dinners, but as time passed, she rarely went out. One day we were having tea at the Dakota, and I asked, "What ever happened to the present John commissioned Dalí to make for Ringo?" Yoko said she'd never heard of it. I explained that John was concerned because Ringo was feeling hurt and disrespected by the other three, and John wanted to give him something special for his birthday. He wanted to perhaps commission a work by an artist.

I made some inquiries and discovered that the artist Salvador Dalí was amenable to commissions, and that he was happy to make a gift for a Beatle. A few days later, I went to see Dalí at his home in Figueres. I explained that John wanted to give something special to Ringo because of their singular shared experience—four boys from nowhere to where they were today. I could see Dalí liked this idea and said he would think about it. I returned to New York, and a few weeks later, Dalí called to say that his "creation" was ready, and that I should come to Spain to pick it up. And not to forget his $5,000 fee, no checks, American dollars.

When Dalí presented me with the objet d'art he had made, I was a bit bewildered. It was like a coconut, or perhaps it was a coconut. He had cut it in half, and he lined it inside with some sort of natural sponge. Embedded in the sponge was a long curly black hair that he'd plucked from his mustache, he claimed, although I had my suspicions. When he added a few drops of water to the dry sponge, the hair unwound. I gave him $5,000 and took the coconut.

When I got back to London, I showed Dali's creation to John and he was thrilled with it. He obviously had a penchant for surrealism. He loved Dali's construction so much, he decided not to give it to Ringo and kept it for himself. He gave Ringo something else, I don't remember what. Yoko said she remembered once seeing something like a coconut, but alas, it was probably packed away in storage.

Just like Dali's coconut, the invaluable transcripts in this book have been stored away in a bank vault for over forty years. They are a kaleidoscope of experiences and opinions. Yet everyone agrees on one thing: the story of the Beatles was meant to end when it did. "It was time for everybody," Ringo says in his transcript.